[brendandahl]

Yury and I are the only paid staff that work very occasionally on PDF.js. We both have not been full time on the project for quite awhile. We do have a pretty active community and quite a few outside companies using PDF.js though.

[nachtigall]

Thanks. Your answer and your work even more so are very much appreciated! I hope you can keep it up. Maybe some of the other companies could also jump in with as financier (though I do not have too high hopes for this as taking is more common than giving...)

[derefr]

Seems like the Internet Archive would be the most likely org to care: a Javascript renderer for PDFs lines up with their "preservation and easy display through in-browser emulation" philosophy.

[phonon]

Please finish first class form capabilities...there is a whole world of enterprise/governmental usage it can influence in a positive way.

[cpeterso]

PDF form support is one of the primary motivations for adopting PDFium in place of PDF.js.

[phonon]

Which is absurd and shortsighted--

1. pdf.js has only seriously attempted to implement forms over just the last few weeks, and has made significant progress[1] not to mention someone did quite a bit of it on their own 4 years ago and no-one seemed interested in working with him. [2]

2. Mozilla has a strong interest in furthering web technologies, and pdf.js could be used in just about every enterprise LOB and government form based workflow (as they slowly move to web technologies), if it matured a bit more. Has Mozilla thought of how their unique position as a non-profit could enable them to partner in ways a corporation could not? The insurance industry on its own produces 10s if not 100s of millions of pages of PDFs every day...has anyone from Mozilla ever talked to ACORD (or even knows who they are?)

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/7613

[2] http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/466362/Blend-PDF-with-HT...

https://github.com/modesty/pdf2json

[cpeterso]

Interesting. I didn't know that someone had started working on form support (in 2016 or 2012). PDF.js started in Mozilla Research as a demonstration, and benchmark, for JS and Canvas capabilities. I don't know how much work adding full form support would be. PDF is a complicated format and I imagine there are a lot of corner cases.

(I work for Mozilla but am not involved with PDF.js or PDFium.)

[phonon]

Acroform support (so not the proprietary Adobe Livecycle XFA stuff) is relatively straightforward once you understand the underlying PDF specs. It's been around since PDF 1.2 (1996!!)

At the rate I see development moving, pdf.js should be able to handle, say, every IRS form well before the end of the year, perhaps much sooner.

If I had the skills or resources to help now, I would.

I still don't understand why Mozilla has apparently not reached out to the larger business/governmental universe to see if they could partner in moving pdf.js forward. A single large insurance company might spend millions each year on licensing and implementing pdf "solutions". I can only imagine what the US government uses (or could use.) Has anyone from Mozilla spoken to 18F?

Perhaps even a open (and not proprietary) JSON (instead of XML) based form standard for "next-generation" forms could be implemented, with PDF.js at its core. (see https://github.com/modesty/pdf2json I linked to before for an element of that...the author is an employee of Intuit...perhaps it's already being used by them for their online tax software?).